Andrei Sakharov

Andrei Sakharov, the Nobel-prize winning Soviet physicist and dissident, is perhaps one of the world’s best-known symbols of the struggle for human rights. Sakharov died 15 years ago, on December 14, 1989. Hundreds of thousands of people came to his funeral, expressing their love and respect for a man whose life for the past 27 years had been a relentless battle against the world’s two greatest threats: nuclear war and communist dictatorship. For the intelligentsia, Sakharov became a hero: his career was a model of moral responsibility. The father of the hydrogen bomb, Sakharov had uncanny courage and faith in the individual. His moral challenge to tyranny made him a virtual martyr, a defender of human rights and democracy who could not be silenced.

At Moscow University in the 1940s, Andrei Sakharov was considered to be the best student who had ever studied in the Physics Faculty. After earning his doctorate at the age of 26, Sakharov was sent to a top secret military installation in the Volga region, to spearhead the development of the hydrogen bomb.

After the first nuclear test (1953) of the hydrogen bomb in Semipalatinsk, Kurchatov addressed Sakharov, thanking him and calling him “the savior of Russia.” That same year, Sakharov became the youngest full member of the Academy of Sciences, the elite body of the Soviet science.

As a celebrated Soviet physicist working on atomic weapons, Sakharov had many privileges and led a prosperous life. Despite that, Sakharov’s awareness of the deadly effects of atomic weapon tests grew. Later in life, he said that he “was working for peace, that my work would help foster a balance of power.” Yet he soon also realized that he was building “the most terrible weapon in human history.”

In 1958, Sakharov began lobbying Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev for a halt in nuclear testing, which actually ended internationally that year. And it was then, he later wrote, that he understood that “the atomic issue was a natural path into political issues.” The rest of Sakharov’s life was devoted to campaigning for disarmament and denouncing the stagnancy and intolerance of the Soviet system.

In 1962, Khrushchev readied new nuclear tests, in connection with the building of the Berlin Wall. As a new open-air test approached that September, Sakharov began to fear that the effects of radioactive fallout from the tests would kill hundreds of thousands of people and accelerate the arms race. He phoned Khrushchev to explain that the test was pointless and that it would kill people for no reason. Khrushchev told him that foreign policy should be left to the experts. The next day, the detonation went off as planned. Later, Sakharov said that that day was “the most terrible day of my life,” and that he “felt he had become another man...,” one who could not “sit on two chairs at once.”

From that day forward, Sakharov ceased to be simply an academician concerned with physical reactions. He became one of the Soviet Union’s most famous political dissidents.

At first, the Soviet authorities reacted mildly to Sakharov’s “heretical views.” In 1968, he was discharged him from all posts connected with military secrets for publishing an article that advocated closer US-Soviet cooperation. In 1975, however, he received the Nobel Peace Prize (his Nobel lecture was called “Peace, Progress, Human Rights”), but was not allowed to go abroad to receive the prize (his second wife Yelena Bonner, whom he married after his first wife had died in 1971, went to receive the award in his stead).

It was not until 1980, when Sakharov severely criticized the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, that he was put under house arrest and exiled to Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod), a city closed to foreigners. There he lived in relative poverty until December 1986, when Mikhail Gorbachev announced the end of Sakharov’s exile and allowed him to return to Moscow. In 1989, Sakharov was elected to the Congress of People’s Deputies, the Soviet Union’s first democratically chosen body, where he continued his struggle until his death at year’s end.